Welcome Weekender Readers!
Underwater Resident of Phuket
Photo by Tamara Eelsing
Thanks for visiting Mar Scuba, your source of scuba diving information for Thailand and beyond. Here is further information and links to our partners in Thailand. If you are interested in booking any of the following scuba diving tours or liveaboards, contact us to coordinate your dive holiday.
Phuket Scuba Diving
Dive Asia offers day trips from Phuket to various destinations. There are usually 5 divers or less per Divemaster in each group. They can also arrange pickup from your hotel with return after the dive day.
Click here to visit Dive Asia's site
Phi Phi Islands
About 3 hours due east of Phuket, famous destination with great diving. Spectacular limestone cliffes above the water become drop offs and coral encrusted landscape under the water with colorful diversity of marine life.
Raja Yai
About 1.5 hours south of Phuket, beautiful tropical island with great hard coral reefs and an excellent opportuntity for enjoyable drift diving. Particularly suitable for the beginner and snorkeler.
King Cruiser
An 85 m catamaran passenger ferry sank near Shark Point in May 1997. Multiple decks, open passages, and depths between 12-30 m, an ideal wreck site.
Raja Noi & Raja Yai
Spectacular dive sites with gian underwater boulders and scenery similar to the Similans. Great chance to see larger pelagics like mantas, eagle rays, and whale sharks.
Shark Point
About 1.5 hours east of Phuket, marine sanctuary with tremendous variety of life. Colorful soft corals and sea fans decorate the limestone pinnacles. Great range of tropical fish and the leopard sharks.
Liveaboards to Similan Islands
Liveaboards give divers the opportunity to explore the Similan and Surin National Parks in more depth. The highlight of a liveaboard trip are the dives at Richelieu Rock. Considered one of the best dive sites in Thailand, it is close to the Southern border of Burma.
Richelieu Rock is an rocky formation, an outcrop covered in soft corals. There is an an amazing variety of marine life, with the chance to see stingrays, guitar rays, leopard sharks and large schools of trevallies and barracudas.
This site is famous for the chance to encounter whale sharks on a consistent basis. Close encounters with two or three whale sharks are fairly common, making this site a unique experience for divers.
Click here to view our partner's Similan Island liveaboard options
Jomtien
Mermaids Scuba Diving Center offers recreational and technical diving in the Jomtien area. They operate daily recreational dives to the Pattaya Far Islands and the Sattahip/Samae San shipwrecks. Diving for the beginner to the expert is available through Mermaids.
Click here to learn more about diving with Mermaids.
Wreck divers with proper training and experience can do penetration dives on the ships, HTMS Khram, The Petchburi Bremen and The Hardeep. The HTMS Khram was given to the Thai Navy in 1962 from the U.S. Government, and was previously the USS LSM-469. The ship was intentionally sunk for scuba diving after the Thai Navy took the armaments off, cleaned the ship, and cut large holes for penetration dives. The top of the wreck is at 15 meters with the bottom at 30 meters, approximately 300 meters off the island of Koh Phi. The steamship Petchburi was interned in World War I, used by the Thai, ran ashore near Koh Sichang in the Gulf of Siam with a load of rice and sank. The cargo ship Hardeep (S.S. Suthathip) was sunk in 1942 by the French during World War II. The maximum depth is 26 meters.
Click here to learn about diving these wrecks.
Maximize Your Vacation
Thailand's Beauty is Above
and Below the Water!
Photo by Tamara Eelsing
For Beginners
Diving is a great way to explore a new destination; there is so much excitement in having the freedom to see the sights both above and below the water! However, unlike some travel experiences (trying new foods, learning muay thai, riding an elephant), diving requires some advance preparation before you can experience the beauty of the underwater world. You will need to learn certain basic skills and understand how to use the equipment before it is safe to enter the water. Rather than spend precious vacation hours completing classroom and pool learning, we strongly recommend learning the basics before you go.
Click here to view our course options for beginners
For Certified Divers
For certified divers who have not been diving in the last year or so, it may be best to consider a one-day refresher course to practice skills, review equipment knowledge (which way to the regs go again?), and get comfortable with buoyancy, weighting requirements, etc. Not only will this allow you to feel more prepared when you approach a foreign dive center, but it will also help you to maximize your time in the water, so you can focus on that eagle ray that just swam by, instead of fussing with how much air is in your BCD. Refresher courses can be done in the ocean as part of a day-trip to Izu, or in one of Tokyo's dive pools.
Click here to see an overview of our scuba refresher course.
For questions about any of the material above, inquiries about courses,
or general feedback, please contact us by email.
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The Zen of Diving™